This recording received the 1998 Gramophone magazine award for "Best Opera Recording."

Mr Chailly’s genius for the Rossini style has ripened with the years. His performance has daring and velocity, the music stripped for action, yet it is open-hearted and free-spirited: obsessive and funny. Did Rossini really take so much care over his orchestration in this slender diversion? I had not thought so until now.... Mr Pertusi’s Selim is as vocally expert asRead more it is theatrically amusing. And Mme Bartoli dazzles here as rarely before. Such vocal brilliance and the words – my words! – so forward and crystal-clear. “Squallida veste bruna!” – an aria you will search for in vain on Mme Callas’s recording – is a tour de force...So there you have it, my friends: as fine a set of Il turco as you’re likely to get.

– Richard Osborne, Gramophone [5/1998]

...Cecilia Bartoli brings not only a beautiful voice but a lively sense of character to the role of the flirtatious Fiorilla.... Roberto de Candia, Ramón Vargas and Alessandro Corbelli ... reveal themselves to be absolute masters of Rossinian style.... Riccardo Chailly conducts this effervescent score with both charm and authority.